Earlier this year, before Apple had too many goto fails and GnuTLS had too few, before everyone learnt that TLS heart-beat messages were a thing and that some bugs are really old, I started a tidy up of the OpenSSL code that we use at Google.

We have used a number of patches on top of OpenSSL for many years. Some of them have been accepted into the main OpenSSL repository, but many of them don’t mesh with OpenSSL’s guarantee of API and ABI stability and many of them are a little too experimental.

But as Android, Chrome and other products have started to need some subset of these patches, things have grown very complex. The effort involved in keeping all these patches (and there are more than 70 at the moment) straight across multiple code bases is getting to be too much.

So we’re switching models to one where we import changes from OpenSSL rather than rebasing on top of them. The result of that will start to appear in the Chromium repository soon and, over time, we hope to use it in Android and internally too.

There are no guarantees of API or ABI stability with this code: we are not aiming to replace OpenSSL as an open-source project. We will still be sending them bug fixes when we find them and we will be importing changes from upstream. Also, we will still be funding the Core Infrastructure Initiative and the OpenBSD Foundation.

But we’ll also be more able to import changes from LibreSSL and they are welcome to take changes from us. We have already relicensed some of our prior contributions to OpenSSL under an ISC license at their request and completely new code that we write will also be so licensed.